Well, last week I finally had the time to do it and I passed the Search Advertising Advanced Exam. Now I’m GAP qualified and, whoohoo!, I now have the big G accreditation.

This exam is by far more difficult than the Fundamentals exam, and my advice to anyone who’s going to take it is to study and memorize everything the learning center has to offer. Experience helps a lot, but there are questions about issues you don’t often face in your ongoing work, so STUDY!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Minding the GAP 2

Internet marketing is hard work. Look for freebies and shortcuts and you are destined to fail. Treat it as a business and succeed!

Learn how to treat this as a business from reliable sources, not hype infested egomaniacs that brag about their income or promise you immediate profits if you purchase this or that.

Put everything into practice immediately. Reading will not get you anywhere. Try, test, loose a bit of money. Get the feeling of things.

Another year had past and now this is my third year online. Man, did a lot of things change since that winter 2007…

If you were expecting an income report of some sort you won’t find one here, if you were following me for a while you would know that.

What I am going to tell you is that I have evolved into a different kind of marketer, one that looks at the big picture and makes strategies instead of having small projects to make a quick buck.

To brake things up, these are the stuff that I didn’t have 3 years ago:

• I no longer celebrate and not excited by sales and commissions. Funny, I used to be on the top of the world when the first dozen of sales came through.
• I became proficient in html and css, picked up a bit of php, and now I am able to use the full potential of Wordpress, my CMS of choice.
• I’m building content rich sites, instead of single landing pages.
• I realize that going after a one-time customer is not economical, I’m using Aweber autoresponder to market to my lists over and over again.
• I own my own products, which I either give away for “free” (for an email), or sell, and leverage the power of affiliates.
• I outsource the work that I don’t want or unable to do myself.
• I am comfortable with paying providers, investing in my upcoming projects.
• I am comfortable with paying for tools that will help my efforts.
• PayPal is my friend.
• Google is my mistress.
• I’m keeping up to date by reading a few pro blogs and news feeds.
• By a few I mean 4… It used to be 20
• I market internationally. US is not the only market in the game.
• I contact and get to know other affiliates. There’s a common interest we all share, and there’s no reason to restrict ourselves to avatars and pen-names.

So, there you go. It’s not ordered in any way and I probably missed a point or two since it’s already late and I’m tired. But you got the general direction, I hope.

You’re welcome to ask questions, comment, or do whatever below…

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Another Year Online

Split Testing, A/B Testing or What’s It Called…

Split testing is as important for a PPC marketer as keyword research.

Instead of spending a week waiting for results and then changing something to see if it gets an increase in sales, you make all the possible variations in advance, so by the end of the week you know which combo is performing better, and ditch the losers!

You can split test everything, and you really should. Ad copy, landing page design and affiliate offers those are the things you should start split testing as soon as you launch your campaign.

What are we testing for?

The goal of the split test can vary. Affiliate offers are rather straight forward – you test for which one is converting better.

With ad copy and landing page design you can test for which one converts better into clicks, or you can test which one converts better into sales. In general, you should concentrate on ad CTR, because you want it to be as high as possible for a high quality score, and on LP CTR because you want to drive that traffic to the offers.

Later as you zero in on the best CTR combination, you will move to testing which one sells the most.

LP Playground

Split testing landing pages is fascinating and interesting. You can test different sales copy, different background colors, different images, and every single change would have an influence on the goal! It’s amazing.

As I already said above, it’s a bad idea to start with only one landing page design and scratch your head at the end of the week because you discovered you had only 14% CTR… Having two or more variations would show you the winner straight away.

Don’t stop after you have your winner though. Create more variations to see if they would outperform the winner!

How to…

Ad copy is simple. Create two ads per adgroup and set them to be shown evenly (not optimized). That way at the end of the day / week, whenever you reach enough clicks to be enough to draw statistical conclusions, you see which one is the worst CTR performer and rewrite it to be like the winner, with a change. That way you will end with a high performer ad after a few rounds.

Offers are also simple. If you use Tracking202 or Prosper202, there’s a built in offer rotation functionality. Otherwise, there are a lot of free PHP scripts available that will rotate the affiliate links on you page. After you have enough sales, you check which one converted at the highest rate.

For testing landing pages I use Google’s Website Optimizer. It offers a/b testing and multivariate testing. What you do is create an experiment where you define the two (or more) versions of the page that you want to test and plant a little script on each one. A goal page is required – a page where Google’s script would check for successful conversion. After that Google will show the different variants to your traffic and collect conversion data.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

PPC Marketing Secrets 1

Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.

This is great info if you’re venturing into ppc. You will understand how the behind the scenes of bidding on keywords works.

Have fun!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Introduction to the Google Ad Auction

Problem:

My blog is read by people already making money online or those planning to make money online. This target audience is aware of Google AdSense and know exactly what it is about.
In other words: a substantial amount of my readers are ad blind. This means little or no clicks for me = no money = waste of expensive ad space = even less money.

Solution:

I’m trying to choose ads that are 100% relevant to the content of the individual post, or category. Moreover, besides the ads being relevant, I want the services to give real added value to my readers.

It appears that this requires hard work of hand picking advertisers, image ads, etc. But, I do believe that on a blog read mostly by publishers this is a way to go and worth the time spent.

The big question is will Google AdSense generate more income than affiliate programs? And, although asked much later down the road, will Google AdSense generate more income than direct advertising?

I will have to wait and see. This is my journey and Google AdSense is on the Celebrity Map…

- Alex

Technorati Tags: google, adsense, ad, money online, blind, clicks, publishers, affiliate, advertising

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Why Did I Join Google AdSense?